4 Factors That are Detrimental to the Success of a Test Environment Management System

Test environment management deals with the idea of dealing, managing, and controlling the enterprise level test environments. It consists of various types of components, including databases, hardware, software, applications, middleware, and test data. All this can be managed well with the help of procedures, tools, and resources effectively.

However, with the ever-increasing number of test environment management tool daily, managing test environments has become more challenging than ever before. There is a clear-cut mandate for businesses that operate multiple slow, inconsistent, and reliable test environments if they keep on doing the same thing they risk incurring higher operational costs and lower test coverage. 

Conducting businesses in the middle of unreliable test environments has made organizations vary in their higher operating cost and lower test coverage. Most of the organizations today recognize these challenges. They are working hard to include best practices that aid in transforming the current operating model to best in class test environment model.

Without further delay, let’s get started with these factors.

Efficient Management of Resources

There are three ways to do this:

• By giving absolute ownership by establishing a dedicated enterprise test environment management team. It is possible to overcome the challenges of the test environment model by adopting the Test Environment Management Enterprise model with a selected few initial difficulties. Once you have put in place a perfect transformation plan, the rest of the operational challenges can be addressed swiftly.

• Another way is by maintaining the same terminology at the enterprise level. Most of the time, it has been observed that people create and use their own words and jargon that can lead to misapprehensions in a test environment. This can result in delays which can hurt the quality of the test environment. The program governance team must define the terminology and ensure that the team adheres to it. With the help of standardization, it is possible to get a better understanding and efficiency when it comes to collecting and disseminating information. 

• If there is no centralized test environment team, it would be an extremely challenging task to implement knowledge management at the enterprise level. The program governance team has to plan and execute a well-structured knowledge base for test environment management. It also has to make sure that all the information is made available to the end-users and stakeholders. 

Strategic Planning & Robust Program Governance

An organization needs to define the test environment strategy at the enterprise level, especially when it comes to recognizing the IT environment management tools challenge faced. It is vital to create a strategy document that will act as a masterpiece to execute test environment management as a comprehensive functional service. 

This strategy needs to be governed by the “Program Governance Officer” by closely working with relevant stakeholders. They create a program governance model by effectively comprehending the business requirement. And then align with the test environment proactively. 

Process Optimisation & Operations Excellence

Consolidating environment estate is by far the most challenging exercise which comprises of getting relevant information about all owners, assets, contact details, vendor details, physical location details, etc. This is one of the biggest challenges at the enterprise level. The test environment team needs to concentrate on creating application constellations based on patterns. It should also know the best way to simplify the test environment landscape. The test environment team also has to work in unison with other teams and business units. 

The test environment team needs to get involved with the early stage of the project so that it can get the requisite information. Otherwise, due to lack of time, incomplete requirements, and deficiency of the owner can result in the team to separate, which can result in a chaotic situation.

Automation

It is possible to automate most of the activities across the test environment lifecycle with the help of single or multiple tools. These proven tools aid in auto deployments, auto-provisioning, and test data management. To improve the turnaround time for the test environment, quite a handful of organizations use automation strategies like Service Virtualisation and Cloud Technology. 

Lots of organizations have already succeeded in automating their everyday test environment management activities, including incident management, knowledge base management, environment booking, and service request fulfillment. 

Final Thoughts

These are some of the challenges faced by organizations while performing in a test environment. The most important thing for an organization is to inculcate best practices at the enterprise level, which can pave the way for a higher level of transformation.